The sky’s the limit for CashFac with Sungard Availability Services’ cloud solution

CashFac provides sophisticated cash management and reconciliation technology that enables its customers to handle complex operations involving high account and transactional volumes quickly and easily while ensuring compliance. Its Software as a Service product is sold both directly and indirectly through reseller banks with customers ranging from housing associations, clearing banks and property managers to governments, fund managers and wealth management platforms.

Historically, CashFac’s infrastructure was hosted in a third party data centre in the Channel Islands but CashFac recognised a cloud-based managed service would better meet business needs. Following a thorough tendering process, CashFac partnered with Sungard AS to offer CashFac Cloud giving its customers fast access to fully scalable cash and client money solutions.

John Ferguson, Head of Managed Services, CashFac explains, “Our customer onboarding process would sometimes take weeks – now it’s a matter of days for a new customer and we can rapidly scale up resources to meet additional demand on the infrastructure.”

CashFac embarked on a lengthy tender process to find the right solution from a provider it could trust. Security was of critical importance in the due diligence process and CashFac was reassured by the fact Sungard AS is ISO 27001 certified which compliments its own IS certification. This fact, coupled with Sungard AS’s reputation in the industry, competitive pricing and 30-year heritage in business continuity led to CashFac ultimately choosing Sungard AS as its partner.“I liked the combination of having local account management but also working with a provider that has national and international reach,” comments John Ferguson. “We have customers in the Asia Pacific region and it is useful to know Sungard has a strong presence in the US and across Europe to support our growth plans.”

Sungard AS proposed a dual site solution with ECS deployed from its London Technology Centre and failover to a second geographically remote technology centre to ensure resilience. CashFac also contracts Sungard AS’s Electronic Vaulting managed backup service to protect its vital data.

Working closely together, Sungard AS and CashFac planned the migration process with minute attention to detail. Any downtime could result in a breach of SLAs leading to financial losses, reputational damage and possible sanctions for CashFac customers.

“Customer onboarding would sometimes take weeks – it’s now a matter of days.” John Ferguson, Head of Managed Services, CashFac PLC

“Sungard’s Enterprise Cloud Service has taken away the headache of having to manage hosted physical infrastructure and all that entails.” John Ferguson, Head of Managed Services, CashFac PLC

“This was a massive project for the whole company and we knew success or failure would be highly visible,” says John Ferguson. “The fact we were able to seamlessly migrate a large number of existing customers from one data centre to another without any outage whatsoever is a big feather in Sungard’s cap. While we were aware of the huge amount of work going on behind the scenes to make it happen, as far as customers were concerned it was business as usual.”

CashFac is now reaping all the benefits of an outsourced service. “Sungard’s Enterprise Cloud Service has taken away the headaches of having to manage and monitor infrastructure,” John Ferguson remarks. “Because of Sungard we are now in a strong position to build this side of the business and react so much more quickly to market changes or customer demands.”

As for the burgeoning relationship between the two companies, he says, “I’ve found the Sungard people I’ve dealt with very helpful and professional. They’ve gone out their way to understand our business and I very much view it as a longterm partnership.”

Business challenge

CashFac, which provides high volume cash and treasury processing and compliance services for more than 500 corporate customers with complex cash and client money operations, needed a secure, scalable platform to replace its physical hosted infrastructure. With pension and investment administrators, employee benefits consultants, property managers, insurance exchanges, local governments and clearing banks among the many customers relying on CashFac to deliver their own services to clients, high availability was critical.